Federal aviation officials have yet to contact the Eugene Airport regarding new baggage screening that goes into effect Friday.
Starting in just two days, security officials must screen every checked bag before it’s placed on a plane, and the process must be overseen by
federal officials.
But airport operations director Mike Coontz said that the Transportation
Security Administration hasn’t
contacted anyone at the airport to
discuss procedures.
“Until we see this federal oversight, we’ll have a lot of questions that remain unanswered,” Coontz said.
Officials have questioned whether the 450 U.S. airports can have the system in place by Friday. Almost two months ago, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta asked if the Jan. 18 deadline was premature. However, transportation officials now say they are on track to meet the Friday requirement.
“We fully intend to meet the deadline,” said Hank Price, spokesman for the newly formed TSA, an offshoot of the Department of Transportation, that Congress created after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Coontz believes that federal officials haven’t called Eugene because there are 174 domestic airports larger than Eugene.
The TSA released preliminary rules to the public. Regardless of whether Eugene officials are in the know, regulations that outline how bags can be searched have already been drawn up.
There are four ways to check a bag before it goes on the airplane, according to Cheryl Temple, spokeswoman for Horizon Air, one of the three carriers that depart from Eugene. Bags can be manually searched, sniffed for explosives by canine teams, put through an explosive detection device or matched one by one to the passengers boarding each plane.
For security reasons, Temple declined to say which method Eugene’s airport security will use. But there are no canine teams in Eugene at this time, and the $1 million, Cadillac-sized bomb screening machines have only been installed at a few airports. Eugene’s isn’t one
of them.
This could mean delays for Eugene’s 750,000 annual passengers. Every bag will have to be manually searched, which could mean long lines. Or bags will be matched to all passengers as they board their flights, to prevent terrorists from loading bombs indiscriminately onto airplanes. However, there are also problems with this approach.
Airlines “would have to extract the passenger’s bags from the belly of the plane,” Coontz said. The process could cause considerable delays if a passenger doesn’t show up. And even if all bags are matched to passengers, the screening method doesn’t foil suicide bombers.
Bag matching “enhances security, no doubt,” Temple said. “But to what degree?”
Jan. 18 is the latest deadline mandated by the Aviation and Transportation Security Act passed by Congress on Nov. 19 to make airports safer.
The act requires that bomb screening devices be in every airport by 2003 and that every airport have a federal security director who ensures each facility is in compliance with the Transportation Security Administration.